Customizing your character in Hytale

Posted by Hytale Team
February 15th 2019

Hytale provides players with the power to customize their character in a wide variety of ways. Whether you’re ransacking a dungeon in adventure mode or taking on other players in a minigame, your avatar provides an opportunity to express yourself. In this article, we’re going to provide an overview of how character customization works, and some of the options that are available to you when creating avatars.

Customizing your character

Customizing your character begins in the My Avatar menu. Here, you set your avatar's skintone, eye color, hairstyle, and facial hair along with multiple layered clothing options. You’re able to freely mix and match customization options and choose from a variety of color options for everything from your character's hair to their clothing.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Examples of some of the short hairstyles available in Hytale.

Longer hairstyles demonstrate how models created in Hytale Model Maker can be used to enhance a character’s look.

Color options provide further personalization!

Hats and accessories can be applied regardless of the hairstyle you choose.

Shirts are a one-size-fits-all covering for your torso, and can be worn underneath ‘overtops’ - jackets, for example.

Layering and animation

Character customization is designed to work alongside Hytale’s gear system. When you equip new pieces of armor or other equipment, these are often layered on top of the look that you’ve defined for your character. This provides an extra degree of creative freedom, allowing you to mix and match clothing of different styles with the various tiers of armor that you’ll craft and collect in adventure mode. We’ll have more to share about gear and equipment in a future blog post.

Longer items like coats animate as you move.

Thematic variety

Hytale's adventure mode takes place in a magic-rich fantasy world, and many of our customization options reflect this. You'll be able to create a wide variety of fantasy avatars, from youthful explorers to grizzled veterans, farmers, magic users, and artisans.

A character from the grittier end of Hytale's thematic range!

At the same time, minigames provide an opportunity for players to branch out and express themselves in lots of different ways. We wanted character customization to reflect this with a variety of customization themes. In addition to fantasy options, you'll be able to choose from stylish modern clothes and themed costumes.

“It’s about giving players options” says artist Conor ‘Stein’ Goodman. “There are two sides - the fantasy side, and the feeling of being yourself - playing with your friends and wearing everyday clothing. There’s also cosplay and roleplaying. We want people to be able to build a saloon or a spaceship and have a set of costumes they can choose from.”

The Hytale art team abides by a set of guidelines that help to ensure that customization items look good together even when they’re drawn from different themes. “We use specific colors” Stein explains. “For fantasy, we go for darker, more saturated tones. When we go for a more modern piece, they’re lighter and brighter. When we’re making something more fun or cute, they use more pastel colors.”

Server operators will be able to override character appearances while you’re playing on their server, allowing creators to define themed looks for their minigames. For example, the operator of a western-themed server might want everyone to wear period-appropriate outfits.

Creating a costume

Inspiration for customization options comes from many different sources. In adventure mode, the zones themselves are a huge influence on the types of clothing options players might be given. In the example above, you can see how a new costume for zone 2 - a sun-baked desert - was designed and built.

“There’s a research phase where I figure out what I want to do and sketch it out” Stein says. “I look up references - like desert clothing - and then I see what looks fantasy enough, what would fit in the game. Everything has to be scaled to fit with the model and work with animations.”

Details inspired by Hytale’s backstory are then added to tie the new asset into the existing world. “I realized that the Ferans in zone 2 wear shackles” Stein says. “I thought that someone in that area might be inspired by that, so I added golden bangles that cover the wrists and ankles. Zone 2 also has cacti that are very bright and colorful, so we reflect that in the clothing. Symbols are important too - there are a lot of symbols in the game, so we try to reflect that as well.”

Expressing yourself

Customizing your character goes further than just your look. Hytale avatars can show different facial expressions and perform emotes, too. Some of these occur in the course of normal play - gritting your teeth as you swing a sword, for example - while others are triggered manually.

An idle animation showing a range of avatar expressions.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of the options you have for personalizing your character in Hytale. Your human character, that is! You’ll be able to choose from several other playable races for your Hytale avatar.

We’ll have more to share about alternative playable races in the future. If you’ve watched our announcement trailer, you may have already caught a glimpse of some of them - why not go back and take another look?